Otherness in Frankenstein: The Confinement/Autonomy
of Fabrication

Jerrold E. Hogle

From Structuralist Review, 2 (1980), 20-45

The universe is a monster of energy, without beginning or end; a
fixed and brazen quantity of energy which grows neither bigger
nor smaller, which does not consume itself, but only alters its
face . . . this, my Dionysian world of eternal
self-creation, of eternal
self-destruction. . . .

(Nietzsche, The Will to Power)

We should begin by taking rigorous account of this being held
within [prise] or this surprise: the writer writes
in a language and in a logic whose proper system,
laws, and life his discourse by definition cannot dominate
absolutely. He uses them only by letting himself, after a
fashion and up to a point, be governed by the system.

(Derrida, Of Grammatology)

The ignorance of the early philosophers on these and several
other points served to decrease their credit with me: but I
could not entirely throw them aside, before some other system
should take their place in my mind. [1.1.8]

(Victor Frankenstein)

[{20}] In the preface-after-the-fact by the author's
author-husband, Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein presents itself as a call for
"domestic affection" (p.
7).1 And
since the book's three narrators finish their stories in the
loneliness of an icebound vessel, the call does go out:
obsessive quests for Truth beyond the domus lead to the
drift of alienation and the cold prison of self-involvement.2 To say that,
however, is not to uncover a moral presence or a presence of
{21} mind that clearly precede the language of the text. It is
really to expose the novel's denial of presence in the
face of its own fabrication and in the face of fabrication as
the basis of human effort. For even as the narrators try to
find the origins of things, the "birthplace" of what they do is
always a locus of writing that refers elsewhere, and the "end"
they apparently seek is always deferred as one production of
signs gives way to another. Robert Walton's quest for the
source of magnetism is
spawned by "a history of all the voyages made for the purpose of
discovery" (p. 11);
Frankenstein's lust for "the causes of life" is engendered by
the works of the best-known alchemists (pp. 32-3); and, at the famous
midpoint of the novel's concentric arrangement (pp. 122-7), the creature's
drive to locate his own genesis is rooted in Plutarch's Lives, Goethe's Werther, Milton's Paradise Lost, and his
maker's laboratory journal, all of which are themselves "rooted"
in other narratives. Moreover, instead of arriving at the
profound knowledge offered by some of their books, the narrators
tell tales to one another that expand on their basic texts. The
search for the origin is put off in new chains of language that
supplement previous chains, with the "central" chain grounding
itself in a library of documents and honing in on the journal of
a fabricator who admits his involvement in earlier
fabrications. What the reader finally gets is an errant packet
from a confused navigator, a group of letters cut off from a
source already adrift on a surface of signs,3 that repeats a
mélange of rhetorical acts within its own act of
rhetoric. The speakers are indeed alienated and imprisoned, but
the movement of figuration is the ostracizer and keeper as it
holds out a fulfilling completion that it also prevents.
Whether it is called an "origin," a "cause," or a "moral truth,"
the underlying presence in Frankenstein is nothing but a
pretension within writing on top of writing, an absent objective
lost from the start "in darkness and distance" (the last phrase
of the book [Walton 17].

So far, though, only Peter Brooks has
taken on the rhetorical problem at the base of this novel.4 He has aptly
seen the monster as a sign of the non-meanings in Nature (human
and otherwise), searching for community and coherence in a
language that offers merely a play of differences. But even
this view presumes an aberration, however ineffable, that
somehow exists prior to composition. For me the monstrosity in
Frankenstein is the very act of {22} composition -- be it
a story, a charted voyage, or a fabricated man -- as it confines
itself within previous compositions that question the maker's
authority and as it becomes autonomous from all authority in the
drive of its own repetitions. Instead of an unmediated Nature,
after all, what the novel offers primarily is a sequence of
performances designed to persuade others on the basis of already
conventional "persuasions." Morality and Human Nature are
talked about, yet only as they are fathered by verbal patterns
that the narrators have drawn from their reading; when Victor
articulates his penchant for "raising ghosts and devils" (pp. 34-5), his desire goes
after "a promise liberally accorded by my favourite authors
. . . Cornelius
Agrippa, Albertus
Magnus, and Paracelsus, who have so long
reigned the lords of my imagination" [1.1.9]. Ultimately each of the
narrators in the book enacts the machine of sign-production
defined by Jacques Lacan: "in the labor which [the speaker]
undertakes to reconstruct [his Nature] for another, he
finds again the fundamental alienation which made him construct
it like another one, and which has destined [his
construct] to be stripped from him by another."5 Thus
fabrication throughout the novel is the making of an Imaginary
Self, an "other one," in configurations allowed by the Other
(the intersubjective-intertextual ground of articulation). This
process literally subjects the composer to the signs of a dead
past that differs from him, divorcing him from a product that
observers will decipher in terms of the Other and not the
author. Mary Shelley
seems to accept just that in her introduction to the 1831
version as she bids her "hideous progeny go forth" into a world
of readers having "nothing to do" with her own life (p. 229). And so I want to
follow out the purely performative gambits in
Frankenstein as they insist, despite their pretensions,
on their own ineffability and their own ways of giving birth to
an aberration.

II

Among his several duties as the "framing" figure in the book,
Walton has the first chance to define the vocabularies that
control the movement of the text. What he reveals in the
process is the charting of his own course within a conflict of
systems:

[The North Pole that I seek] ever presents itself to my
imagination as the region {23} of beauty and delight
. . . there snow and frost are forever banished; and
sailing over a calm sea, we may be wafted to land surpassing in
wonders and in beauty every region hitherto discovered on the
habitable globe. Its productions and features may be without
example, as the phenomena of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly are
in those undiscovered solitudes. [Further,] I may there
discover the wondrous power that attracts the needle: and may
regulate a thousand celestial observations that may require only
this voyage to render their seeming eccentricities consistent
for ever.(pp. 9-10)

On the one hand, Walton can project what he does at this point
because he accepts a rhetoric of telos or anagogy. Here
every word presupposes an End, a final Revelation of Meaning,
which lies beyond example and yet provides the standard for
inadequate but visible pre-dictions of it. Mundane nature in
these terms is simply a gallery of signs holding out "a
foretaste of those icy climes" (p. 9) in metaphoric emblems
that mystify and promise all at once.6 The mystery, in fact, is bound up
with the promise, for the emblem resists the approach of
investigation even as it vows to initiate the investigator. In
any case, human perception and human action can only reach their
goals under this inscription if they attain the primal space
that completes and conflates all metaphors. Mary Shelley even
cements these notions in her 1823 addenda to the novel, where
the Pole is cited as proof that "the aspect of nature differs
essentially [or 'at the essential level'] from anything of which
we have experience" (p. 10). 0n the other hand, Walton also
intones a rhetoric of tabula or representation, something
like the episteme that Michel Foucault has found in major
texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7 Now the ground
of truth is not the Essential Sign but the capacity in language
for charting the memory-traces of the mind. Under these
conditions the explorer seeks meaning by recording and arranging
names for his observations, trying always to dissolve
"eccentricities" by rendering old data consistent with new
perceptions. The Transcendent Standard remains, but only as an
assurance of the chart's emerging validity. As Descartes
suggests, It provides a guarantee whereby the reason can claim
an Origin (or God) as the prototype of itself, a presence behind
the self-presence that represents in a gradual process. There
is, of course, some duplicity here; the desire that seeks the
fullness of Nature in a developing table already assumes a
Nature complete in itself. Yet, whatever the case, telos
and tabula are very different ways of {24} pursuing
self-fulfillment.8 In the former, power and value
depend on the nearness of the self to the Essence.
Representation demands little more than the progressive and
consistent expansion of itself.

Still more to the point, as Walton continues to use both schemes
for encoding himself and his voyage, his "resolutions" become
"as fixed as fate" (p. 15),
confining his account within their textual demands and their
opposition to each other. While he plays the hero of a
teleological quest, he has to see the Pole as a blend of
established metaphors for the primal kingdom. Thus it combines
elements of Hyperborea, Eden, Heaven itself, and even the Mount
of the Muses. Walton can thereby talk of his failed poems as a
groundless "Paradise of my own creation" in need of that center
from which the inspired can draw the original Word (p. 11). At the same time,
Captain Walton must plan his itinerary by way of "St Petersburg" and "Archangel" (pp. 9 and 13); he must give his crewmen
places in such a scheme by describing them as noble savages (pp. 14-15); and, when he maps
the route he will follow into the polar region, he has to
arrive at "plains of ice, which seem to have no end" (p. 17). He has made a prideful
advance toward Heaven on his own power and must be cleansed from
the guilt of presumption in Cocytus, the frozen core of Dante's
Inferno. Naturally his only way out is a harrowing of
Hell by a Christ figure, so Victor is subjected to the role once
he is taken on board. "Such a man has a double existence,"
Walton says; "he may suffer misery, and be overwhelmed by
disappointments; yet when he is retired into himself, he will be
like a celestial spirit, that has a halo around him, within
whose circle no grief or folly ventures" (p. 23). But even as he
proceeds through his own Commedia, Walton must undercut
that vocabulary in the most obvious ways. Just as telos
urges him to search for heat in the very extremes of the North,
tabula leads him to note "the southern gales" that
"breathe a degree of renovating warmth which I had not expected"
(p. 16). He must also cite
empirical grounds for his voyage that have nothing to do with
the Muses, and so he lists his qualifications in "mathematics,
the theory of medicine, and those branches of physical science
from which a naval adventurer might derive the greatest
practical advantage" (p.
11). In this light the failure of his effort is caused, not
by presumption, but by his miscalculations regarding the polar
ice-cap. Even worse by the standards of tabula, these
mistakes result {25} from an interest in telos that is
both antisocial in its mysticism and impractical in its
methodology.9

Yet the real "causes" of the failure are aporia (the hesitation
between rhetorical modes) and the resulting parabasis (the
foregrounding of articulation as mere performance). Within
their own boundaries, first of all, telos and
tabula make problematic assumptions about reference; one
offers signs that indicate nothing but a privileged emblem, the
metaphor at the apex, while the other represents mental
associations that are themselves representations of other
things. When the two clash openly they expose each other's
duplicities, thereby shattering their own illusions of an
accessible Truth beyond or before sign-ification. What appears
instead is a return of the repressed: the primordial otherness,
the deferral of meaning at the point of origin, that signifiers
promise to mitigate and fail to mitigate by their very nature.
For Walton, the truth about the Pole has to emerge as an absence
the moment Victor asks if the ice will soon break. "I could not
answer," the Captain must say, "with any degree of certainty"
(p. 21). Walton's passions,
the movement of his own mind, will not surface on paper, for
writing "is a poor medium for the communication of feeling" (p. 13). Because his voyage and
his letters, then, are mere trackings of what is always
somewhere else, the only goal that Walton can really pursue is
verbal transmission for its own sake. "You may deem me
romantic," he writes to his sister, "but I bitterly feel the
want of a friend. I have no one near me, gentle yet courageous,
possessed of a cultivated as well as of a capacious mind, whose
tastes are like my own, to amend or approve my plans" (p. 13 again). In the words of
Coleridge, one of Mary
Shelley's favorite writers, "my nature requires another nature
for its support, [and] reposes only in another from the
necessary indigence of its being."10 The "I AM" is a lack in need of a
mediator, its fabrication perceived by someone else, and
everywhere in this dialectic the meaning is relational and
deferred. The self is constituted by the other just as the
other points back to the self, but without (in
Frankenstein, at least) the Aufhebung that
dissolves the Otherness in Hegel. By saying that he is
"romantic" in his desire for a friend, Walton may be hoping for
the telos projected in quest-romances. Yet the exchange
when it comes (with Victor Frankenstein) can only be an occasion
for supplementing -- "approving" or "amending" -- {26} what is
already supplemental ("plans"). With his "hopes blasted" and
his "purpose unfulfilled" (p.
213), Walton must finally be nothing but a signifier, the
conduit of a dead man's tale and the catalyst of another's
reaction. "I will endeavor", he concludes, "to detail these
bitter circumstances to you, my dear sister; and while I am
wafted towards England, and towards you, I will not despond" [Walton 8]. In the end he is
left with the very thing he has tried to escape: a production
of writing as groundlessly grounded as the poems of his "own
creation" [Letter 13].

Perhaps the best figure for Walton's situation, however, appears
in his second letter home. There he alludes in the most
reckless way to another text by Coleridge: "I am going to
unexplored regions, to 'the land of mist and snow,' but I shall
kill no albatross, therefore do not be alarmed for my safety"
(p. 15). Now, granted,
Walton keeps some of the details in his promise. Yet he speaks
of the creature's arrival right at the juncture where the ice
closes in (p. 17), the very
point at which the Ancient Mariner sights his bane for the first
time. From then on, again like his counterpart, Walton is "lost
in surprise and admiration" (p.
207), overwhelmed by symbols that destroy his self-assurance
as they cry out for decipherment and recomposition. His future,
too, is much like his predecessor's; he must return to England with a failure
"shamefully" on his mind (p.
213) and expiate this curse by telling his tale and nothing
more. And the irony goes beyond a pattern of avoiding and
resembling the Mariner. Walton is also repeating a text that
obscures its own ground in concentric ripples of interpretation
(the Mariner's, the Wedding-guest's, the narrator's, the
reader's),11
making it less a quest for knowledge and more a search for
words. There is no uncovering of the "prior causes" for the
killing of the Albatross, nor does the Mariner behold the Spirit
that supposedly inhabits the depths and drives the ship of
fate. Instead the Mariner is mainly answering a question,
:wherefore stopp'st thou me?" (Mariner, l. 4),
and articulating a moral after the fact to explain a sea of
signifiers. Nonetheless, Walton takes on the sins of the
Mariner anyway without even committing the deed that activates
the torment in the poem. His guilt has no rationale besides the
one in the Rime; a
command displaced from Biblical writing to provide a basis for
the self. In addition to the stain of presumption, Walton
accepts the guilt of failing to love "things both great and
small" (Mariner,
l. 615) {27} simply because a text has a powerful hold on
his psyche. Indeed Walton admits as much in the 1831 revision
when he faces the vertigo of desire as both aroused and engulfed
by a symbolic order. "You will smile at my allusion," he says,
"but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my
attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous
mysteries of ocean, to that production of the most imaginative
of symbolic poets. There is something at work in my soul which
I do not understand" (p.
231). What is at work, of course, is a pattern of desire
and repression generating guilt, but all these "motivations" are
the results of the pre-text that encourages and denies
exploration for the sake of confronting the self as a production
of language.12 Walton clearly projects himself
"like another one" in terms of a contradictory "other" that is
also other than itself, and if that is not frightening enough,
he doubles that duplicity
by playing the Wedding-guest to Frankenstein, who himself cites
the Rime as one
basis of his discourse (p.
54). Walton's "self," if it emerges at all, is really
dismembered and parceled out in several aspects of composition.
He is a repeater of other texts, an interpreter of existing
symbols, a rhetorician in need of an audience, and an audience
beholding a rhetorician -- all of which replay the deferred
status of the Mariner supplementing previous signs and waiting
to be supplemented himself.

III

Victor embodies the same predicament even more, and not just
because he mediates the creature's tale and is mediated by
Walton's letters. He is the quintessential fabricator, carried
away by methods of production beyond his control to the point of
giving them a new life exceeding and threatening his own while
claiming that life as "his" nevertheless. His exordium
to Walton points right to that paradox: "I ardently hope that
the gratification of your desires may not be a serpent to sting
you, as mine has been" (p.
24). He takes his desire to be personal, yet here it
repeats a version of Original Sin, a function from a
teleological rhetoric that forces Victor to see himself as an
eater of forbidden fruit. He is indeed a Faust-figure as many have
said, but only because he believes the alchemical writers who reign
as "the lords of [his] imagination" [1.1.9]. For Magnus, Agrippa, and Paracelsus, the "natural
magician" is not really free to find the materia prima in
{28} the moldering depths of Mother Earth.13 Though he
holds out that very picture in his creation of a homunculus,
Paracelsus outlaws his own effort. The source of life, he
claims, is "one of the greatest secrets, and it should remain a
secret until the days approach when all the secrets will be
known."14
The Christian language of telos is both the harbinger and
the concealer of Revelation; any fabricator who violates the
opacity of sacred signs will confront his own Satanic projection as the
allegory of his guilt. Consequently, when Victor sets out "to
mock the stupendous mechanism of the creator of the world"
(Mary's introduction, p.
228), he must defile a sanctified region (the sepulchers of a church-yard)
and raise a Devil who reduplicates the Lord of Cocytus Himself.
"Oh! no mortal could support that countenance," cries Victor;
"it became a thing such as even Dante could not have conceived"
(p. 53). The creature is
thus a repetition-with-a-difference who has to look as he does.
The prescriptions of his maker demand a monster as the
ritual-trace of a broken taboo, the echo of the Father's Word
repressing unlicensed desire.

Victor even builds up this rhetorical masochism by styling his
creation as the act of a "modern Prometheus" (the subtitle of
the novel), for just as he wonders if "a new species would bless
me as its creator and source" (p. 49), he enters another text
of fated catastrophe, especially in its Christian refractions.
The third Earl of
Shaftesbury presents the Already-Written in The
Moralists (1709): "shall we mind
the poets when they sing thy tragedy, Prometheus! Who with thy
stolen celestial fire, mixed with vile clay didst mock heaven's
countenance, and in the abusive likeness of the immortals madest
the compound man: that wretched mortal, ill to himself and
cause of ill to all."15 Victor, of course, carries out
this figuration to the letter, all the way to the "abusive
likeness" at odds with itself and its parentage. And even as
Hesiod shows how women and violence came to punish Promethean
hubris,16 Victor's presumption comes back to
haunt him in the prospect of a female creature. Starting with
only a vision of two monsters on the loose, Frankenstein
imagines "a race of devils" for which "future ages might curse
me as their pest" (p. 163), a
wrenching yet built-in reversal of the self-image that he had
once projected beyond his own death. As the arche-text demands,
the Promethean act has
made the new creator an outcast from {29} Paradise yet again.
But now the sentence is passed by some constructs at the base of
Victor's effort, by his confinement in verbal chains that make
his fabrications painfully his and painfully other at the same
time.

On top of all that, too, Victor has to see "the Modern
Prometheus" as a contradiction in terms. "It may appear very
strange," he admits, that a student of ancient mythology "should
arise in the eighteenth century" (p. 34), since the age-old
metaphors defining the causes of man stand "entirely exploded"
by a "system of science" that is "real and practical" by
contrast [1.1.7]. The
exploding mechanism, naturally, is tabula, and Professor
Waldman explains that to Victor at the University of Ingolstadt. There the Moderns
respect the Ancients just enough "to give new names and arrange
in connected classifications, the facts which [our Fathers] in a
great degree had been the instrument of bringing to light" (p. 43). Only by making the
shift himself can Victor speak to Walton of "a scientific
pursuit [that offers] continual food for discovery and wonder"
(p. 46). This is hardly the
telos view of time, after all; repetitive sin and the
Gift of Revelation are here covered over by an accumulation of
data that is, by definition, never complete. Now Victor's road
to the origin has entered the texts of Erasmus Darwin and Sir Humphrey Davy, where the source
of life is never beheld as a singular essence and is yet
available in the emerging laws of attraction that pull disparate
elements into living wholes. These laws, in turn, are based on
the symbolic relation of chemical affinities and electrical polarities, a
system of differences that underwrites the experimental galvanising of dead tissue.17 Once into
this scheme Victor strives "to infuse a spark of being" into "a
lifeless thing" (p. 52) and
thereby grants all powers of decision to a programme (or
proscription) that dismantles the early codes of his desire.
First, instead of the primal seed in the primal Mother, he is
"led to examine the cause and progress of decay" in specimens
from a crypt (p. 47). Then, when he tries to
reverse this progress in an act of representation, he is only
"encouraged to hope that my present attempts would at least lay
the foundations of future success," and he is really kept from
perfection under empirical dicta by "the minuteness of
parts" that he must confront in making the body of a man (p. 49). Again the creature has
to be ugly, but the grounds are different. Tabula forces
Victor to make something rough, oversized, and {30} deferred,
transforming a brave new world into a demonstration that
requires improvement at some other time. Aporia reigns once
more as the Promethean
dream dissolves in the face of a laboratory patchwork and as
Victor recoils from the patchwork in the name of his dream.

At the same time, because of this nexus, the well known
"lessons" of Victor's story break apart to reveal the poses of
the schemes that generate them. Indeed his most famous
pronouncement is a blatant mix of inconsistent postures. "If
the study to which you apply yourself has a tendency to weaken
your affections," he tells Walton, then that study is certainly
unlawful, that is to say, not befitting the human mind" (p. 51). Here of course is a
repetition of the most eternal Law, the Injunction at the Tree
of Knowledge. Here too is an echo of John Locke, for whom the proper
training of the young is easily clouded by a strange "Connexion
of Ideas wholly owing to Chance or Custom" that "fills their
heads with false views, and their Reasonings with false
consequences."18 Victor, in fact, has already
placed himself in this pattern when he recalls finding "a volume
of Cornelius Agrippa" during a storm at Thonon (p. 32). Except for this
circumstance, he says, "the train of my ideas would never have
received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin" (p. 33). It seems the psyche
composes tables because the table is its given method, and if an
aberrant sign infects the matrix started by Nature, a disease
has begun that has to pervert the expansion of the mind
thereafter. But the development of chance impressions is not a
primordial Fall, so Victor can keep the two together only by
leaps of rhetoric. The supreme indication, as we might expect,
comes when he remembers his ultimate discovery: "I paused,
examining all the minutiae of causation . . . until
from the midst of this darkness a sudden light broke in upon me"
(p. 47). All at once
Revelation appears to dissipate the metonymic table and carry
the soul to forbidden regions beyond the powers of
representation. Though he ascribes his downfall to a ruined
education much of the time, Victor never speaks of his greatest
secret as a mistaken association. It is always as
"impenetrable" as the Mysteries of Heaven (p. 207). Thus it is no
surprise when Victor's final speech becomes an oxymoronic dance;
with the proper name of his goal always and already supplanted
by the initial repressions of his own languages, he urges Walton
to {31} "avoid ambition" under the standards of telos,
yet he hopes that "another may succeed" in filling out the table
that he has helped to augment (p. 215). By this point,
though, his terms have called more attention to themselves than
they have to their "contents," leading Walton to take his
visitor's words as more often purely persuasive than strictly
informative. Victor's "eloquence is forcible and touching," we
find, and, especially when he recounts a dream, he "gives
solemnity to his reveries that render them to me almost as
imposing and as interesting as truth" (p. 208).

Hence, despite the continuing fiction that a "truth" which never
appears is somehow the sine qua non, Victor's tale can be thrown
open to a reading of its fabrications as empty reinscriptions.
The monster, as a case in point, is a metaphor for the origin in
the most radical sense. He condenses in his own visage a panoply
of metaphors that are themselves alluding to metaphors of the
origin, and Victor beholds that process in the dream that
follows his act of creation:

I saw Elizabeth [his fiancée] walking in the streets of
Ingolstadt. Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I
imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the
hue of death; her features appeared to change, and I thought
that I held the corpse of my dead mother in my arms; a shroud
enveloped her form, and I saw the graveworms crawling in the
folds of the flannel. I started from my sleep with horror [and]
beheld the wretch -- the miserable monster whom I had created.
(p. 53)

As the Freudian critics have noted, the figures for love and
decay in this passage are blended into one icon by the end of
the dream, a single face that incarnates both the desire and the
repulsion that Victor feels in his approach to the "original"
states of non-difference (sexual union and death).19 Clearly
enough, the creature's image is an outgrowth of memory-traces
that displace and subsume each other in Victor's psyche as he
seeks to join himself to the most fundamental Other he can
find. But that machinery only makes the monster's conception a
play of textual surfaces. Once he confronts fabrication as
related to generation, Victor recalls the already-written script
of his marriage to Elizabeth, and that recollection is linked to
the moment of death in which that script was composed. He
promises to marry Elizabeth, after all, in spite of her adoption
as his sister when his mother appoints the girl as a surrogate
for herself and then joins {32} the hands of her two "children"
in the final statement of her life (p. 38). As a result, to embrace
his primary (and partially forbidden) symbol of love is also to
reach out for the traces of his lost origin (his buried
mother). Yet the Signs of the Mother have already been offered
by the alchemistswithout the tainted mediation of Elizabeth if Victor will
simply plumb the depths of the earth. The actual digging, in
turn, comes when the table of minute observation -- a close look
at the features of death -- has repressed alchemy as Victor's
standard discourse. So the excavation (or penetration) that
leads to the creature is a kind of sexual climax, a return to
the womb, a grasping for an absent wholeness, a wish for death,
a gathering of data, a journey to the logos, a violation
of Sacred Mysteries, a bid for immortality, and a search for
some alternative to the lack of finality in life, but all these
are performed only in figurative ways and only on the basis of
other figural patterns that reveal no Formal Cause prior to
figuration. When he is finally put together out of vestiges
from the grave, themselves already signs of an absence at the
beginning, the monster is a "cryptic" production in every
conceivable way: a simulacrum of the body composed of
decomposed tissues, a figure of many other faded figures, and an
interweaving, fabrication, or textus of the conflicting
rhetorics engulfing his maker. The real horror is not so much
his sewn-up appearance as what his face reveals about Victor's
main objective. The primal Other is now discovered as nothing
but a symbolic order, a plethora of fragments referring to
themselves, where the source remains forever lost and yet where
the origin always beckons within the multiplicity of signs as
the dark and distant object of desire.20

If Victor admits this Otherness in his narrative, though, he
does it only indirectly. Most of the time he strives to place
the supporting cast in roles that suit his tropologies, turning
his parents into the monarchs of a Paradise regained (pp. 27-8), Elizabeth into a
Beatrice who sheds "radiance from her looks" (p. 235), and Henry Clerval, "the
brother of soul" (p. 31), into a young Amadis and a sympathetic
expert on "the sensations of others" (p. 63). All of these serve
Frankenstein as elements in a "sacred" Beginning (p. 31), as
synecdoches whose progressive deaths incarnate a Paradise lost
and an education gone wrong. Still, on those occasions when
Victor relaxes his rhetoric, he grants these characters some
freedom from the schemes he {33} provides and even allows them
to define their own abilities as supplementers of an absence.
While "the world was to me a secret which I desired to
discover," Elizabeth takes life as "a vacancy, which she sought
to people with imaginations of her own" (p. 30). She finally becomes so
acquainted with the groundless nature of fabrication that she
can dissect the posturings of the law at the trial of the maid
Justine: "Oh! How I hate its shews and mockeries! When one
creature is murdered, another is immediately deprived of life in
a slow, torturing manner
. . . They call this retribution" (p. 83).21 Clerval, for his part, is most at
home in the endless play of empty symbols. He finds
"consolation in the works of the orientalists," based as they
are on the deferral of desire ("the fire that consumes your own
heart"), and he takes on "languages [as] his principal study"
merely "to open a field for self-instruction" (p. 64). Thus, by joining in a
celebration of sign-production as radically other and never
complete, Victor gives in here and there to fabrication as a
freedom confined only within its methods of operation. For
those few moments he accepts Percy Shelley's call for
the "abolition of personal slavery";22 he becomes "a portion of that
beauty which we contemplate" and permits an other to be locus of
his changeable significance without insisting on the presence of
an Absolute as the basis of his self-definition.

When he confronts himself alone, however, he cannot accept
significance as deferred. At such times the fear of
non-meaning, the terror of a possible vacancy at the center of
existence, begets a vertigo that only an eschatology can
alleviate. "Alas!" he exclaims in recalling his journey to the
Mer de Glace, "why does man boast of sensibilities superior to
those apparent in the brute; it only renders them more necessary
beings. If our impulses were confined to hunger, thirst and
desire, we might nearly be free; but now we are moved by every
wind that blows, and a chance word or scene that word may convey
to us" (pp. 92-3). He also
quotes Shelley in the same breath: "We feel, conceive, or
reason; laugh or weep,/ Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares
away;/ It is the same: for, be it joy or sorrow,/ The path of
its departure still is free" (lines 11-14 of
"Mutability"). None of these figurations will grant him an
absolute presence; in fact, that problem is their subject. All
they can show is the distance of man from any "necessary" basis
save the movement of desire, and that movement is a constant
irony where even the mind is as different from itself {34} as
any sign that seems to describe it. Actually symbols have more
justification than those who use them, since people insist on
being swayed by a "chance word" and what it claims to project.
Whence Victor, seeking some permanence in contemplation at
least, rushes into a conventional plea for union with the cosmos
by asking "wandering spirits [to] allow me this faint happiness
or take me, as your companion, away from the joys of life" (p. 93). Again, as in Victor's
dream, a love of beauty and a lust for death appear as sides of
the same coin, both offering an end to the self's continual
otherness in figures that promise a non-difference they cannot
really grant. Even so, in the face of perceptions that are
never more than signifiers of his own finitude, Victor sees only
two means of transcendence as he beholds the opaque surface of
Montanvert. Either he can
try to dissolve into Nature and be a part of what is curtained
from his sight, or he can force the closure of
self-consciousness by seeking his own demise.

Yet the answer to this prayer is what it has to be: a
revelation of difference instead of union. As if responding
directly to Victor's plea, the monster emerges from his Alpine
retreat as a shocking emblem of what occurs when apotheosis is
attempted with the aid of mere signs (p. 94). Victor has tried to
call forth the object of his heart's desire, but instead he is
placed in the hands of the machine he has made for that very
purpose, the engine of his autoeroticism that has taken on a
life of its own. Indeed, from the start, Frankenstein's effort
has been a masturbational strategy designed to bypass mortal
insemination for the sake of disseminating ultimate causes in a
rhetorical display. Now the product of his phallic push for a
metaphoric child has become so autonomous from the "father" that
it renders Victor helpless (in a way, castrated) in the face of
the patterns built into it. It carries out unconscious
aggression while the conscious mind is passive, yet only in
pursuit of the schemes that Victor has espoused to constitute a
symbol for the source. The creature is the agent, after all,
who works through the telos and tabula plots that
Victor has claimed for himself, completing a tragedy and a
perversion of ideas by killing those who offer mediation instead
of the origin. In doing so the monster obscures his proximity
to causes by aping the systems that compose him against the will
of the maker who has set him into motion. As a presence in his
creation Victor is emasculated, drained of personal power, cut
up into his pre-texts, {35} and finally effaced altogether; the
"child," in turn, is cut off from the parent to find his own way
as a supplement of rhetorical chains. No wonder Victor
oscillates among sympathy, rejection, and self-abuse in reacting
to what he has made. The creature is so much an extension of
his creator, so entirely the incestuous product of a
self-centered desire, that he appears as another self looking
back at the self.23 On the other hand, he is
manifestly different as he acts out the scripts that have torn
Victor apart even while they have spawned the act of
composition. The author creator must be punished -- by himself,
if necessary -- for repeating the desire of his progenitor-texts
in spite of their warnings against repetition, and the symbol of
this violation must have its own compulsion to repeat that
grinds down and supersedes the fabricator in the very
fulfillment of his fabrication.24

Soon, with this realization pressing upon him, Victor begins to
welcome death as more than a closure of consciousness. "This
hour," he says to Walton, "when I momentarily expect my release,
is the only happy one which I have enjoyed for several years.
The forms of the beloved dead flit before me, and I hasten to
their arms" (p. 215). Of
course his necrophilia is still a craving for lost plentitude
and a lust for non-difference, but all of this makes death at
the same time the foundation and ultimate "truth" of
fabrication. By projecting self-completion into the future of
his own absence, Victor is admitting how every production of
desire presupposes the death of the producer. To be sure, he
has always assumed as much, for he has constantly worked through
dead letters to get beyond the level of signs, and that process
demands that he be somewhere else when his composition presents
itself. The creature is the prime example, since he is made to
reveal the sources of life to future generations in a body made
from fragments that point to the death of their sources. And
Victor's last words carry that effort on by proposing an
ultimate union in phrases that deny the permanent presence of
the self within them. Signs of love and decay come together
once again, but only because they hold out the fulfillment of
the speaker and then defer it to a point when the "I" will
signify the living death of a textual function. Thus Victor is
pleased in the end when his fabrication leads him to the real
"basis" of monstrosity:
the erasing of the fabricator from the product of his
aspirations, from the text of his immortality that is also his
{36} epitaph. When all is said and done, Victor has located
what he seeks, and yet he has merely beheld the hollow ground
(the original "crypt") of a performance that reveals nothing
besides the nature of performance.

IV

The monster's story, in its turn, is a highly appropriate center
for Frankenstein. It apparently shows the
coming-to-awareness of a primitive mind, the dawning of a
seminal man (the progeny of a Prometheus). As a result,
it becomes a thematic core for the life surrounding it,
unfolding the origin on a sea
of ice that prefigures the apex of the world and the
outskirts of the novel. Yet with all its focus on beginnings,
it is only (as Edward Said would say) a "gift inside
language,"25
a reproduction of beginnings in words that are after the fact
and already circumscribed by other words. If the monster is the
most original of all the narrators, he is also the most derived
and displaced. He is first a point of departure composed by
another rhetorician and then he is a victim of succeeding
narrators dispossessed of a statement that comes to the reader
at least twice refracted by different voices. The creature can
be an origin only as a representation re-presented by other
representations. He "begins" for himself as a lack, a set of
signs, which needs additional signs in order to mean at all.
And he "ends" as a fabrication of beginnings that owe their
existence to fabrications already begun. The concept that comes
closest to his "essence" is Jacques Derrida's monstrous
(non)concept the supplément, for the creature
centers his text by looming as a violent exorbitance, an initial
figure that is secondary to start with, and by holding out his
transcendent origin as a myth to be imposed by signs that both
repeat and supplant him.

Within itself, moreover, the creature's tale is an allegory of
selfhood-as-language. The monster occupies the place of the
source by composing his youth entirely out of the rhetorics he
learns to speak, so much so that everything he says can be
removed from him and traced back to a single text or a textual
system in his "library." His growing self-awareness, for
example (pp. 97-100), is
recalled in the patterns of the first book he discovers, the Comte de Volney's Ruins of Empires
(1791; noted initially on p.
114). {37} Volney himself begins with pre-scriptions from
Diderot, Rousseau, and Condillac among others,26 and thus he
renders the first man as a figure "like animals, without
experience of the past [or] foresight of the future." The
archetypal person comes to himself in "the forest, guided only
and governed by the affections of his nature" including "the
pain of hunger" and the need to "cover his body"[Volney 6].27 The
creature, when he remembers with "difficulty" the "original area
of my being" (p. 97),
therefore starts with "the forest near Ingolstadt" and with the
anguish of "hunger and thirst" (p. 98). He then adds at this
point (not before) how a "sensation of cold" drove him to find
clothing in Victor's apartment. This representation is blatant
reinscription, as it determines temporality by a pretext and not
by "what actually happened." In a wider vein, too, the creature
accounts for his moral inclinations partly by accepting Volney's
main rhetorical mode. This allows him to encipher his entire
journey as a tabulation of perceptual growth that demands
certain results to complete its operation. Hence the De Lacey
cottage becomes the schoolroom where the creature learns first
to link actions with his own sensations and later to repeat "the
names that were given [to] familiar objects of discourse" (p. 107). After that, when the
early steps have been organized by a symbolic order, the
creature can represent to himself the motives, routines,
histories, and possibilities that constitute a life with a
meaningful logic, even though his representations may generate
this logic as a way of justifying themselves. He can now
produce a topos in which to encode the mystery of his own
appearance and the revulsion of human beings, thereby spawning a
set of decisions based more on the mechanics of tabula
than a knowledge of his own mind. He concludes, for one thing,
that circumstances make the soul, that it feels only what
impressions and physical needs have allowed it to produce. If a
world that once seemed worthy of love is altered by acts of
rejection and abuse, then the responder is bound to cultivate
the new propensities himself (as Volney specifically teaches the
monster on p. 115).
Concurrently, though, the monster projects a cure in the
interlaced community that representation is always pursuing.
"It was in intercourse with man alone," he cries, "that I could
hope for pleasurable sensations" (p. 114). Consequently he can
say to Victor, "make me happy, and I will be virtuous" (p. 95); then he can ask for a
counterpart as a means {38} of securing that virtue. With her "I
can live in the interchange of those sympathies necessary to my
being" (p. 140) and there
develop the list of relations that all men can attain if they
fulfill the ethics of empirical-tabular language.

Not surprisingly, however, the creature makes just as many
claims in the rhetoric of telos, which he encounters in
Paradise Lost and which
he readily adopts as the basis of "true history" (p. 125). Here he can take on a
meaning that is constant instead of additive.

I often referred [Milton's characters], as their similarity
struck me, to [myself]. Like Adam, I was created apparently
united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state
was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come
forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and
prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was
allowed to converse with, and acquire knowledge from beings of a
superior nature; but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many
times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition;
for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors,
the bitter gall of envy rose within me. (p. 125 again)

Naturally the creature regards this "emblem" as a related sign
of what he has already become. Yet the sign really directs him
to adopt it as a beginning, a fated excuse for what he is and
does at all times. And so it describes his status well before
his account of Paradise
Lost, especially when a prospect of shelter looks "as
Pandemonium appeared to the demons of hell" (p. 101). The monster sees
himself as damned from the start, foredoomed in the absence of
Creator and community to assume a metaphoric origin that
confronts him by chance. He actually starts, of course, with
his own non-meaning, but Milton provides an Expulsion by
the Father to explain even that; the poem thereby engenders a
lust for primal chaos (since the Father is not there) as a
fitting response to the terror of primordial separation. "I,
like the arch fiend, bore a hell within me," the creature
decides, "and finding myself unsympathised with, wished to tear
up the trees, spread havoc and destruction around me; and then
to have sat down and enjoyed the ruin" (p. 132). At the same time,
since the feelings in this outcry are only the projected desires
of a text, an upending of that text generates a reverse kind of
anticipation. The monster upends it himself, in fact, by
composing the history of the De Laceys in a teleological fashion
(p. 117-22). He sees the
heroism of Felix {39} De Lacey as rewarded by his reunion with
Safie, who flees the chaos of the pagan east for the Christian
world of her mother's line, thus recovering her lost origin and
her predestined other. Aided in this fabrication by Milton's picture of
prelapsarian love, the monster now has a construct to offer as a
scheme for dissolving his Satanic posture. When he
finally delivers his story to his creator, then, he asks for a
Paradise regained complete with a new Eve and a new Eden for a
would-be Adam longing for
the pleasure of the text. Nothing could be more completely
rhetorical, for this appeal is not only a reference to mere
figures. It is also a crafty sliding from a language of need to
a language of destiny. Victor has every reason, it would seem,
both to admire his creature's eloquence (p. 144) and to suspect its
inconsistencies as "treachery" against mankind (p. 206).

Yet Victor is not really being fair. Like his maker, the
monster persuades others only insofar as he is persuaded himself
on the best methods of self-construction. He decides on his
Satanic argument, we discover, only after debating the varied
alternatives that he confronts in one place at the midpoint of
his tale. In addition to Paradise Lost and its offer
of a mythos with Beginnings and Ends, the creature
beholds the textual "selves" of Plutarch, Goethe, and Frankenstein,
though only as they are verbal matrices naming an absence and
only as they hold out different promises of meaning with no
foundations aside from linguistic assumptions. The offer
closest to Milton's is
presented in the Parallel
Lives, where ancient leaders are compared across
enormous gulfs of time on the basis of moral absolutes that
transcend temporality; any monarch "who remits or extends his
authority," Plutarch claims, "is no longer a king or ruler [but
in fact] a demagogue or despot" ["R & T"].28 To
statements of such surety, where the sign claims to "let you in"
on a Permanence, Goethe's hero has to retort with questions:
"Can you say 'this is,' when everything is transitory, when
everything rolls by with the speed of a tempest [?]
. . . What is man, that vaunted demigod?
. . . When he soars in joy or sinks in suffering, is
he not arrested in both, brought back to dull, cold cons
ciousness at the very moment when he yearns to lose himself in
the infinite?"29 This time the creature opens up a
tabulation of passions, but one cut off from constant referents,
indeed from anything except death and the sliding of signifiers
over signifieds that are not really present to {40} themselves.
Humanity exists merely as different from a fullness that exists
merely as different from the finite. And Victor's journal, no
surprise, presents a variation on the same problem. Even as it
gives the monster his "accursed origin," it also makes him
nothing but a repetition that is different, a "filthy type" of
his author "more horrid from its very resemblance" (p. 126). Worse yet, the exact
nature of the (dis)connection is unclear, for the journal is
replete with rhetorical shifts from the "language which, painted
[Victor's] horrors" to "accounts of domestic occurrences" [2.7.4] If the maker's disgust
renders the monster's disgust "ineffaceable" [2.7.4] it is mainly because the
creature is a mangled reflection of an entangled text (the
patchwork of a patchwork). In the end the journal only provides
its reader with an unanswered question, "Why did you form a
monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?" (p. 126 again), restating the
very lack that the creature has been searching to fill. Since
Werther offers nothing
more secure, the monster must fall back on the guarantees of Plutarch, who takes "a firm
hold on my mind" (p. 125),
and the emblems of Milton,
who turns lack into an affront. "I remembered Adam's
supplication to his Creator," the monster says, "but where was
mine? He had abandoned me, and in the bitterness of my heart, I
cursed him" (p. 127). From
here on, because he is committed to the absolutes of rhetorical
choices and because the Creator "remits his authority" by
denying a new Paradise, evil becomes the creature's good in the
drive of a language that comes to underlie his every act.

Still, for all that, the monster does acknowledge the nature and
the ground of his longings. Just before he recounts the
subscription to Milton, he provides a sense of his "real"
beginnings by quoting his author's quotation of another author
and finding the significance that such a (non)origin reveals.
"I was dependent on none, and related to none," he concludes,
for "the path of my departure was free"; and there was none to
lament my annihilation. [Then] who was I? Whence did I come?
What way my destination? These questions continually recurred,
but I was unable to resolve them" (p. 124). He has not read
Victor's journal at the time these queries appear to surface,
but he has when he raises them before his maker; the result
establishes the "past" as the present of his citations, the
"present" as the deference of his lamentation, and the "future"
as an answer-on-the-way full of {41} previous figurations. His
argument for a mate, then, is actually circular. In the
unguarded moment when he sees the fictionality of his
telos and tabula projections, he holds out his
counterpart as a near-duplicate of his own nature: "I now
indulge in dreams of bliss that cannot be realised. [Therefore]
I demand a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself;
the gratification is small, but it is all I can receive, and it
shall content me" (pp.
141-2). The road to a meaningful self for the creature must
look forward as well as backward to repetition, since a mind
without a presence to ground it has to defer its significance to
a self-reflecting image yet to be completed. m Now even his own
questions about his identity manifest the peculiar "spacing" of
the fabricated "I." The self-composer is always in search of a
founding past, and yet that quest is the making of a
rhetoricized future, where difference can only operate as
repetition and repetition can only operate as part of the play
of differences.

Consequently, the novel's readers are more incisive than they
know when they see the monster as "uncanny" to himself and to
others. Freud defines the Unheimlich, after all, as the
looming of repressed otherness, the confrontation of man with
his own compulsion to repeat and his own sense of death (or
imminent castration) at the heart of differential desire.30 The monster,
clearly enough, incarnates this ugly secret precisely because he
embodies fabrication. First he is created in a "primal scene"
of multiple repetitions that exposes its ground as fragments of
death at every turn. After that he differs from people as they
are thought to be while resembling them as products of a
symbolic order, and so he is held at a distance by acts of
repression and names that are not specific. Soon his
difference, however, begins to reflect the same thing in
everyone else. Standing as he often does for the systems that
others pursue, he mirrors the rhetorics of characters who use
him -- and need him -- to finish their own deferred histories.
He is the father of a new race to Victor, a fabulous savage to
Walton, a beneficent spirit to the De Laceys, and later a demon
to each of these, constantly doubling in his own duplicity
the lack of permanent value in all of his detractors. He
beckons his observers and himself, in fact, toward the prospect
they most fear: a vision of man effaced by his own fabrications
and forced to accept continual displacement, a Nietzschean
energy of repetition that kills, as the only basis of a selfhood
that will never be fully {42} present. As Derrida has said,
"the future can only be anticipated in the form of absolute
danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted
normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of
monstrosity."31 The creature therefore answers his
own questions about himself when he starts the drift toward
absence at the close of the book. Once he can burn himself to
ashes, he decides, "my spirit will sleep in peace; or if it
thinks it will not surely think thus" (p. 221). This in itself is a
quest for non-difference that is monstrously different from its
own claims, for not only is it split in half by a blatant aporia
and headed for the signs (the ashes) of lack instead of
transcendent thought; it also is a tearing of existing figures
out of the religious text that holds them, a violent
displacement of a "constituted normality" resulting in the
salvation of mere rhetoric. The creature may be projecting a
recovery of his own origins in the finality of dead tissue, but
all he can really do is produce a set of signifiers by being a
signifier repeating other signifiers. What remains of him is
chiefly a pre-figure for the later displacement of readings and
rewritings, some of them in the novel and some after its
publication. Monstrosity
by definition is never finished, even with itself. As the
uncanny "basis" of fabrication -- or as an endless remaking of
Frankensteinfilms --
it always demands the confinement of reproductions within its
frightening difference even while it has to give way to the
autonomy of different reproductions.

V

Some of my readers, of course, will attack the erasure of Mary Shelley from much of
what I say here. And naturally I can retort with the example of
Victor Frankenstein, who exposes authorship as a
self-involvement that only disperses and effaces the self
involved. Yet I cannot deny the worth of the recent studies
that see Frankenstein as the product of a
birth-anxiety.32 For if Mary Shelley was always
afraid that birth was the prelude to an inscription in stone,
then she confronted the same terrors in the act of writing.
Indeed in the 1831 preface, the essay that calls her fictional
"progeny" something "hideous" [Introduction 12], she reflects
in revealing ways on how fabrication is like reproduction. One
parallel is the "anxiety of influence"; she speaks of Shelley "inciting" her to
"prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the
{43} page of fame" (p.
223). The progenitor always has his or her progenitors, be
they actual ancestors or inspiring writer-husbands, and the
achievements of those who come before may suffocate the one who
follows in operations (or pages) that have already been
produced. The moment conception is considered, in fact, all
sorts of priorities are inescapable: "invention," Mary adds,
"does not consist in creating out of a void, but out of chaos;
the material must in the first place be afforded: it can give
form to dark, shapeless substances, but it cannot bring into
being the substance itself" (p.
226). For the woman especially, the inseminator is
generally thought of as someone else, and so in this passage
where she tries to develop something already begun by Cicero's
inventio and the Book
of Genesis, Mary Shelley is obviously in the situation of
her own narrators, subsumed as they all are in an onslaught of
predecessors who deny original meaning and offer only
prefigurations.33 Worse still, the ensuing "child"
is always duplicitous in aping previous authorities and yet
keeping the new parent from possessing what is forever other
("the substance itself"). The ultimate loss of child-possession
and work-possession, then, is another similarity in the creative
trauma of both. What comes forth can be regarded as "yours,"
but it is also not "yours" when it finally supersedes the
maker's control and the maker's life. As it happens, Mary
Shelley sees the autonomy of Frankenstein well before her
son (the namesake of her dead husband) is independent of her.
In 1823 she writes
to Leigh Hunt from London on the stage production of her novel at
The English Opera House. "The story is not well managed," she
finds, and what remains most vividly from the book is "the
nameless way of naming the unnameable" when the creature is
listed as a blank on the playbill.34 Even that, in point of fact,
supplants the shifting nomenclature of the monster and thus
underlines primarily the eliding of the author by her
interpreters, the covering up (nay, interring) that she readily
faces when she resigns her "offspring" to her readers in 1831
(p. 228). Whatever she may
claim elsewhere, the Mary Shelley who appears in connection with
her product understands only too well the entirely consuming and
entirely separate memorial that the spawning of a fabrication
must finally produce.

Conversely, she also sees the breach between fabrication and
insemination. The first disseminates the signs of the something
{44} deferred, while the second offers at least the hope of an
emerging presence. And that disparity, if anything, is the most
constant "theme" in Frankenstein in spite of -- and
because of -- its deconstruction of itself. Even though the
author cannot unite the telos and tabula schemes
that confine her, both of them agree on mediation, the operation
of the signifier, as more pressing and more attainable than the
ultimate "presence within." The narrators are frustrated and
destructive only because their drive for an absolute leads them
to reject the mediators that hold It out and keep It hidden at
the same time. If Victor's avoidance of Elizabeth and Walton's
absence from Margaret Saville have often been stretched into
Mary's attack on a preoccupied Shelley, it is no stretch
to see that avoidance as a flight from the mere otherness (the
incompleteness of "domestic affection" [Preface 2]) that constitutes
much of human life. Victor ought to love his monster on the
same grounds, the grounds of desire as always different from its
objectives and from itself, always aroused by an Other that
denies fulfillment even as it offers the pleasure of symbolic
exchange. The supreme locus of this moral non-presence, though,
is the poet Henry Clerval, who stands as a reinscription of the
uncorrupted self in Wordsworth's "Tintern
Abbey":

The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to him
An appetite: a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.

The signs on every line of this passage are always and only
mediators, announcing their difference not only from themselves
and the desiring self (the locus of an "appetite" directed
elsewhere), but also from a "remoter charm," a presence "far
more deeply interfused" that announces its absence the moment it
is signified. The poet and his repetition in Clerval, both of
whom start as figures for a previous text, thereby present their
focus as the attempted but fragile "likeness" of themselves and
what differs from them. They offer a world of mere signs
displacing {45} other signs and calling for a rhetorical
communion, all of which looks out for a lost origin without any
attempt to recover it.35 Victor follows this citation, not
surprisingly, with a verbal attempt to recover Clerval, who has
now been killed by the mediating engine that is made to push
mediators aside. Yet the resulting eulogy is another
fabrication of an absent presence and a fragmentation of the
speaking self into a desire for another text beyond the one in
progress, a vivid example of the angle I suggest for approaching
the entire novel that is Frankenstein. As a further
result, too, I cannot really offer this suggestion as any sort
of absolute. It is only, like the novel that it displaces and
re-enciphers, a sub-scription to a group of signs. It is
working out its own confinement and its own autonomy from the
author in the pursuit of desires generated by other texts, and
its only goals are the energizing exchange of another's reading
and the possible understanding of its own monstrosity.

Notes

1. All my citations from the novel and its
prefaces come from Frankenstein, or the Modern
Prometheus, ed. James Rieger (Indianapolis, 1974), the only
version to date that includes the text of 1818, the addenda of
1823, and the substantial revisions of 1831.

2. Several studies have argued this conclusion
as evidence of a moral presence in the novel. See especially M. A. Goldberg, "Moral and Myth in
Mrs. Shelley's Frankenstein," Keats-Shelley Journal, 8
(1959), 27-38, and James Rieger, The Mutiny Within (New
York, 1967), pp. 81-9.

3. On the absence and drift of letters and
epistolary fiction, see Homer Obed Brown, "The Errant Letter and
the Whispering Gallery," Genre, 10 (1977), 573-99; on
"the necessary Nachtäglichkeit of voyaging," see
John Carlos Rower, "Writing and Truth in Poe's The Narrative
of Arthur Gordon Pym," Glyph II (Baltimore, 1977),
pp. 102-21.

4. See "'Godlike Science/Unhallowed Arts':
Language, Nature and Monstrosity," in George Levine and U. C.
Knoepflmacher eds., The Endurance of Frankenstein:
Essays on Mary Shelley's Novel (Berkeley, 1979), pp.
205-20. I am grateful to Professor Brooks for sending me a copy of his
article prior to publication. Something in this direction is
also attempted by L. J. Swingle in
"Frankenstein's Monster and Its Romantic Relatives: Problems of
Knowledge in English Romanticism," Texas Studies in
Literature and Language, 15 (1973-4), 51-65, but this effort
ignores the inherent mystery of rhetoric itself.

5. Jacques Lacan, "The Function of Language in
Psychoanalysis," trans. Anthony Wilden, in The Language of
the Self (Baltimore, 1968), p. 11.

6. For the best study yet of the Puritan
emblematics that Mary Shelley draws from her father, see J. Paul
Hunter, The Reluctant Pilgrim: Defoe's Emblematic Method and
Quest for Form in Robinson Crusoe (Baltimore, 1966). I am
also indebted personally to Professor Hunter for comments on
Frankenstein and on my present effort.

7. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An
Archeology of the Human Sciences, trans. anon. (New York,
1970), esp. 50-77.

8. Some intimations of this conflict (though not
in the rhetorical terms) appear in John A. Dussinger, "Kinship
and Guilt in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein," Studies in
the Novel, 8 (1976), 38-55; Irving H.
Buchen, "Frankenstein and the Alchemy of Creation and
Evolution," The Wordsworth Circle, 8 (1970), 103-12;
David Ketterer, Frankenstein's Creation: The Book, The
Monster, and Human Reality, ELS Monograph No. 16 (Univ. of
Victoria, 1979) pp. 9-44; and George
Levine, "The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein,"
The Endurance of Frankenstein, pp. 3-30.

9. For an attack on "Polar fantasies" using
these very standards, see the anonymous "Polar Ice and the
North-West Passage" in The Edinburgh Review, 30
(June-Sept, 1818), 1-59.

10. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Cobrun (New York, 1957-61), I, no.
1679. For more on the place of Coleridge in
Frankenstein see Robert Kiely,
The Romantic Novel in England (Cambridge, Mass., 1972),
pp. 166-73.

11. This succession of displacements also
includes the gloss, though Frankenstein probably does not
quote the poem from the 1817 text. See Lawrence Lipking, "The
Marginal Gloss," Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), 609-21. I
cite the Rime, by
the way, from the 1798 version in The Annotated Ancient
Mariner, ed. Martin Gardner (New York, 1965).

12. For a wider discussion of guilt as the
consequence of textuality, see Paul de Man, "The Purloined
Ribbon," Glyph, 1 (Baltimore, 1977), pp. 28-49, an essay
to which I owe much.

13. For the best statement of the promise, see
Henry Cornelius Agrippa,
Three Books of Occult Philosophy or Magic: Book One --
Natural Magic, ed. Willis F. Whitehead (1897; rpt. London,
1971), p. 34. For the interdiction of what he has just said,
see Agrippa again, Of the Vanitie and Uncertaintie of Arts
and Sciences, ed. Catherine M. Dunn (Northridge, 1074).

14. Quoted in translation by Radu Florescu,
In Search of Frankenstein (Boston, 1976), p. 227. In
addition to the homunculus, there is a pre-text for Victor's
work in the mechanical figure by Albertus Magnus that points
to the same warning. See William Godwin (Mary Shelley's
father) in Lives of the Necromancers (London, 1834), pp.
260-3 and 359-61.

17. The clearest exposition of Darwin's approach to
spontaneous generation appears in the Additional Notes to The
Temple of Nature (1803; rpt. London, 1973), esp. pp. 1-13
and 46-79. Indeed on p. 3 of these mini-essays he describes how
"microscopic animals are produced" through "infusions [of]
vegetable matter" by "electrical scientists." And it is just
such experiments that Mary
Shelley connects with Darwin in her introduction to
Frankenstein (p.
228). Davy pursues "the
dependence of electrical and chemical action" during the
Elements of Chemical Philosophy (1812) in The
Collected Works, ed. John Davy (1840; rpt. New York, 1972),
IV, esp. 91-131. This book also prefigures Waldman by arguing
the displacement of alchemy through
"observation, experiment, and analogy" (IV, 2). For her reading
of this very section, see Mary Shelley's Journal, ed.
Frederick L. Jones (Norman, 1947), p. 73.

18. An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford, 1975), pp. 395
and 397. Mary even notes a reading of this text while she
composes Frankenstein in the Journal, pp. 74-5.

19. A good summary of the usual Freudian
readings appears in Martin Tropp, Mary Shelley's Monster:
The Story of Frankenstein (Boston, 1976), pp. 11-83. The
most often used (though uncited) ground for such responses, of
course, is Beyond the Pleasure Principle in The
Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey et al. (London,
1953-66), XVII, 7-64.

20. Lacan even regards this kind of discovery
as an unmasking of "the true monstrum horrendum," a
divulging of "what is destined by nature to signify the
annulment of what it signifies," See the "Seminar on 'The
Purloined Ribbon,'" trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French
Studies,48 (1972), 63 and 71.

21. Such a statement, of course, is not
original with Elizabeth. It is one of several allusions to Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political
Justice, 3rd edn, ed. F. E. L. Priestly (Toronto, 1946),
this one echoing volume 1, 322-46. Yet it also reflects the
concern of Mary Shelley's father that existing systems have no
basis in anything except their own rhetoric.
Frankenstein, after all, does resemble Caleb
Williams (1794), Godwin's tale of a servant pursued by a
fiendish master, both of whom have created themselves in textual
images. By the end of that novel the speaker is led to wonder if
a solid definition of self is possible at all in the modern
world. See Caleb Williams, ed. David McCracken (London,
1970), p. 326, and Jerrold E. Hogle, "The Texture of the Self in
Godwin's Things as They Are," boundary 2, 7, No. 2
(Winter 1979), 261-81.

22. See "A
Defence of Poetry" in Shelley's Poetry and Prose,
ed. Donald H. Reiman and Sharon B. Powers (New York, 1977),
pp. 496-7. Further citations from Shelley's work have been
checked against this book.

23. Too many critics, however, have stopped at
this point in assessing the creature as a
Doppelgänger. The group even includes Harold Bloom
in "Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus," Partisan
Review, 32 (1965), rpt. in Bloom's The Ringers in the
Tower (Chicago, 1971), pp. 118-29. This essay neatly shows
how Victor voids himself by giving all his powers of desire to
his creature, yet it does not see how Victor pursues creation
expressly to achieve a definition of self that needs fabrication
to ground it. For me the monster is a double for something
already double, a second other that embodies Victor's complex
relation to the Other of his textual options.

24. On these problems of "authorship" I am much
indebted to John T. Irwin, Doubling and Incest/Repetition and
Revenge: A Speculative Reading of Faulkner (Baltimore,
1975), pp. 158-72.

25. A notion developed out of Nietzche in
Beginnings: Intention and Method (New York, 1975), p.
43.

26. These authors guide the epistemology of
Mary Shelley in Burton R. Pollin,
"Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein,"
Comparative Literature, 17 (1965), 97-108. Pollin does
cite some persuasive parallels, without a doubt; but in
concentrating on these writers as "influences" (forces flowing
into Mary Shelley's mind as presences of thought), he
misconstrues their relation to Frankenstein. I find Mary
entering into the verbal possibilities of their texts, and this
view is supported by the creature's own "entrance" into Volney,
a writer whom Pollin scarcely mentions.

32. See especially Ellen
Moers, "Female Gothic: The Monster's Mother," The New
York Review of Books, 21 March 1974, 24-8, and Marc A. Rubenstein, "'My Accursed
Origin': The Search for the Mother in Frankenstein,"
Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 165-94.